New and improved God*

I recently slipped into a strange but placid teleological position. I’ll describe it here, mostly as a record for myself.

I have an extremely reductionist mind. It tends to question the truth or sanctity of almost anything, such as what “belief” really means, if people actually feel love, why we’re attracted to our partner, why boys really become soldiers, the legitimacy of forgiveness, the legitimacy of our thinking, the value of family ties, whether our pleasures are noble or masturbatory, the nature of wanting, cognitive therapy, “strength.” And other sacred cows. A big one, I suppose, is the nature of the universe.

Like many people, I wonder what everything is, where it came from. Unlike some smarter people, such as physicists who believe an extremely small something exploded out of the blue, created time, and became absolutely everything, I see no sense in a theory of one beginning or many beginnings. Arbitrary creation and infinite regress are theories that are child’s ideas and meaningless ideas, as I understand it.

My teleological position came out of the undeniable insanity not only of existence, but of our required thinking about existence. That is, we cannot assume that a smallest particle of existence exists. We cannot assume that a largest or limited universe exists. And our mind is not capable of conceiving an answer to these problems: Once we contemplate existence, we reach nonsense.

To be clearer: The mind cannot picture “smallest.” It cannot picture “largest.” It cannot picture “beginning” without “seeing” something right before that. It cannot conceive of nothingness. In other words, all our rationality – and there is a good amount of it – sits on a ground of the complete absurd.

So comes my belief system. Reality itself seems to have no limits or cause or sense, which is absurd. However, our mind at its best can only conceive of nonsense, which is necessary and inescapable. Therefore, it is likely that Mind is the basic state of nature. Mind that knows nothing, and thereby is the basis of an unknowable universe.

I hope this satisfies my readers. We’ll call my new theory Fred.

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* Alternately titled -- Your move, Larry Krauss.